Angela Hopkins: Carrying a Concern; Surviving a Ministry Among Friends
- windycooler
- 9 hours ago
- 7 min read
What does it mean to carry a concern?
In 2018, Angela Hopkins offered one set of answers in On Carrying a Concern, Episode 08 of the interview series hosted by Kristina and Callid Keefe-Perry.
Her voice rang with clarity, courage, and the kind of spiritual authority that’s earned, not claimed. Angela traced a spiritual journey that led her from the pews of a Missionary Baptist church in Dayton, Ohio, to the red soil of Kenya, and eventually into the heart of Quaker witness in Ithaca, New York.
Her story was not only one of personal transformation—it was a testimony to faithful public ministry shaped by deep listening, communal discernment, and uncompromising truth-telling.
I met Angela for the first time in 2018 as well.
Seven years later, in July 2025, I sat down with Angela again at New York Yearly Meeting’s summer sessions. The conversation felt like a continuation, not a repetition. If the 2018 interview was a calling-in—an invitation to understand the depth of Angela’s journey—this one was a calling-out: a prophetic, unflinching witness to the cost and the call of ministry in a religious culture still struggling to live its values.
Angela doesn’t offer polished how-tos or tidy theological frameworks. She offers herself: a Friend shaped by decades of racial justice ministry, spiritual labor, and heartbreak. “That is faithfulness,” she says,
“not that it looks like, you know, Rembrandt made it. But have I been faithful to the peace?”
For Angela, faithfulness isn’t about outcomes. It’s about integrity—about staying close to the Spirit even when the work is thankless, even when the consequences are sharp, even when no one else is watching.
It’s the kind of faithfulness that led her to Kenya, where she first encountered Quakers at a triennial gathering she hadn’t even known was possible. Seminary studies had introduced her to Quaker theology, but she had no idea that Friends were still a living community—let alone one that numbered in the millions, many of them Black, and many of them women in pastoral leadership.
In Kenya, she met Priscilla Makino, a pastor at Nzoia Monthly Meeting, whose deep companionship and late-night “John-boy conversations” about God, oppression, and liberation cracked something open in Angela. What she found there was not just theological permission to lead as a woman or to love her LGBTQ+ siblings freely—it was a spiritual community where she could bring her whole self.
Angela became a released Friend in Kenya and began ministering across the world, including among Friends in the United States, where she encountered a stark contrast: white Quaker communities often speak of peace and justice, but struggle to live into the vulnerability those values demand. The theology might have been familiar, but the pipes were different.
“The water tastes of the pipes,” we agreed in our 2025 interview—a phrase I’ve used jokingly (in reference to an old dismissal of Quakers and our messages "from God"), but Angela made it plain and powerful. Even Spirit-led messages, she said, pass through human systems shaped by trauma, racism, and cultural assumptions. “If the water is essential, what must we do to purify our pipes?” she asks.
Racism, perfectionism, fear, and paternalism—these are sediments that clog our vessels, dull our discernment, and make ministry harder than it has to be.
Angela doesn’t stop at critique—though her critiques are searing. She tells the truth about the hidden cost of ministry: how she depleted her savings to fund her work, how she lives now on Social Security, how the labor of care and justice often falls heaviest on those already most burdened. “I will be living on $1,000 a month for the rest of my life,” she says plainly. Not because she failed—but because the structure of our meetings failed her. Her labor was real. Her love was deep. Her faithfulness was costly. And yet the support often did not come.
This is a mirror, not just a memoir.
Angela’s experience is not rare among public ministers, particularly those from historically marginalized backgrounds. “Friends support the things they feel culturally comfortable with,” she says. That means anti-racism work—especially the messy, relational, un-glossy kind—is often left underfunded, misunderstood, or quietly resented.
Guilt, she says, is one of our biggest barriers. “We got to get over our guilt so that we can [do] the work.” We form committees, write minutes, talk endlessly—but fail to act. And when we do act, we expect public ministers to be prophetic without being disruptive, polished but not angry, professional but unpaid. These contradictory expectations form what she calls the “unseen cultural tax” on ministers of color. It is not just exhausting—it is unjust.
Angela also names what few dare to: the ways unmet needs turn sideways. Gossip, triangulation, and resentment don’t come from nowhere. They come from unacknowledged pain, from relationships that haven’t been built, from wounds that haven’t been tended. “You don’t feel bad when you get hunger pains,” she says. So why do we shame emotional and spiritual hunger?
To support ministry, we must build trust, not just structures. We must allow for truth-telling, for showing our bellies, for breaking the illusion that unity means sameness or silence.
And we must recognize that structural injustice doesn’t simply vanish—it morphs.
Racism, Angela says, “doesn’t change, it mutates.” She shared an example from Boise, Idaho, where incarcerated people set fires in a warehouse they had been sent to live in after their heating was shut off. The system failed, but the story blamed them and called this a riot. Without naming systems, our so-called faithfulness is complicit in their lies.
And yet, for all the pain she names, Angela is not without hope. She speaks of joy—but not the kind that skips over grief. “We want to go straight to joy,” she says. “We can’t do that.” Instead, we must pass through the fire, let it teach us, and let it soften our hearts. We must embrace the fullness of spiritual experience—whether it looks like trembling silence or embodied praise, whether it comes from unprogrammed worship or from a grandmother recognizing the Spirit in her grandchild’s quaking body, as Angela's did for her.
Angela teaches public ministers to:
Honor their limits and name their scars
Accept the gap between effort and result
Be faithful, not flawless
Remember that peace—not polish—is the guide
And she challenges meetings to:
Build relationships, not just procedures
Fund what is faithful, not just what is familiar
Stop confusing guilt with transformation
Make space for public ministers to be whole people, not idealized symbols
In both 2018 and 2025, Angela Hopkins has shown us what it truly means to carry a concern: not just to follow a leading, but to keep showing up when it gets hard, to speak truth when it costs something, and to build a spiritual home where no one is asked to leave part of themselves at the door.
“If Jesus came back to a Christian community,” she reminds us, “they wouldn’t let him in the door. He doesn’t have the right credentials.” Angela has never asked for the right credentials. She has offered her life instead—faithful, tender, bruised, and beautiful.
For more of Angela's thoughts, please check out the "Nurturing Worship, Faith, and Faithfulness" series of YouTube videos, produced by New England Yearly Meeting. Pictured is Quakers and Reparations from 2021.
Friends Incubator needs substantially more resources than we thought we did even a month ago.
We are experiencing absolutely overwhelming demand for our work with eight times as many fantastic applicants for our fellowship than we have paid spots for, and a month more of applications to go.
And that isn't even half of the demand. Our convener hasn't been home or (not working in some way) for most of the summer, all day, every day. We need A LOT more funding to meet the expressed needs of Friends and meetings. Now is the time for this movement toward ministry and it needs support. We are absolutely committed to offering all of our content and services in a pay-as-led and fellowship-based model, but this means we need to substantially increase our fundraising base, as we are not a huge Quaker institution but a little grassroots initiative made up of collaborations and sweat. We need a much, much bigger boat. Can you help us reach our goal of an additional $30,000 this summer so we can immediately expand our services and staffing? Please donate to us: HERE.
If you donate to us we spend it, immediatly. We are building a movement, not an institution.
You can also send a check made out to Sandy Spring Monthly Meeting to Sandy Spring Monthly Meeting (ATTN: FRIENDS INCUBATOR), 17715 Meeting House Road, Sandy Spring, MD, 20860
Next week our blog series with Tom Hamm will continue with Tom's take on "Quaker saint" John Woolman. Past public ministers in the series are George Fox and Patricia Hunt Cadwallader.
On Aug 20th, we start our new five-part series on the prophetic imagination. Registration is free, but required (and donations are, again, so very appreciated!)
And it doesn't stop. We have an info session (on Zoom) about our insanely popular fellowship for ministers and meetings scheduled with Quaker Leadership Center on August 26th. You can choose one of two time slots. Find out more: HERE, ON OUR FACEBOOK PAGE.
Later this month we will hear from Quaker public minister Kody Hersh about some of his favorite living public ministers, starting with "performance artists": Peterson Toscano, Amanda Kemp, and Cai Quirk.
🦈⚓️ Is cabaret Quaker ministry? What about performance art? Poetry? Giant queer tapestries?
Kody Hersh says yes—when it’s grounded in Spirit, done in community, and answers the call of the moment. 🎭🌊
Ministry isn’t about the shape of the thing, as Angela told us this week—it’s about faithfulness to the leading. 🧭🪝
